Chapter 14 Terms and Definitions
- Market Revolution
The transformation of the U.S. economy in the early 1800s into an interconnected national market, driven by new technology, transportation, and manufacturing.
- Samuel Slater
British-trained mechanic who smuggled textile technology to America and built its first successful factory in 1791, earning the title "Father of the Factory System."
- Cotton Gin
Eli Whitney's 1793 invention that rapidly separated cotton fiber from seeds, making cotton hugely profitable and deepening the South's reliance on slavery.
- Interchangeable Parts
A manufacturing technique pioneered by Eli Whitney using standardized, identical components, laying groundwork for mass production.
- Lowell System
A Massachusetts textile-mill labor arrangement employing young farm women, housed in supervised boardinghouses, seen as a model of orderly early industrialization.
- Robert Fulton
Inventor whose steamboat, the Clermont, proved commercially successful in 1807, revolutionizing river and coastal transportation.
- Erie Canal
The 363-mile waterway completed in 1825 linking the Great Lakes to the Hudson River, which slashed shipping costs and made New York the nation's leading port.
- Transportation Revolution
The rapid development of canals, steamboats, and railroads that knit the country into a national market and enabled regional economic specialization.
- Great Famine (Irish Potato Famine)
The catastrophic famine that struck Ireland in the mid-1840s, driving over a million poor, Catholic Irish immigrants to American cities.
- Nativism
Hostility toward immigrants, especially Catholics, that grew as Irish and German immigration surged in the 1840s and 1850s.
- Know-Nothing Party
A secretive nativist political party of the 1850s that opposed immigration and Catholic influence in American politics.
- Cyrus McCormick
Inventor of the mechanical reaper, which sharply increased midwestern grain output and helped mechanize American agriculture.
- Cult of Domesticity
A 19th-century ideal holding that women's proper role centered on the home and family rather than public or economic life.
- Early Labor Unions
Workers' organizations that emerged in the 1830s–1850s to push for shorter hours and better conditions, often treated as illegal conspiracies by hostile courts.
- National Road
One of the era's key federally funded highways, stretching from Maryland into the Ohio Valley, that helped carry settlers and goods westward.
- Economic Specialization
The tendency of regions to focus on particular industries — manufacturing in the Northeast, grain and livestock in the West, cotton in the South — as the national market grew.